Re: THEORY: irregular conlangs
| From: | Christophe Grandsire <grandsir@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, October 1, 1999, 7:13 |
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Daniel Andreasson wrote:
>
> Anyway. My two questions. What do you guys think
> of this? And do you do this in your conlangs?
> AFAIK, in most languages the copula verb is
> irregular, but most conlangs seem to be very regular.
> Am I right or wrong? I know many of you (as I once)
> want an extremely logical language, one that you
> have to invent because there aren't any logical
> natlangs. But those of you who persue a natlangy
> touch of your conlang, how far do you go in your
> irregularities?
>
Some natlangs are very regular in fact. Japanese for instance has a
handful of irregular verbs and that's all. Even the Japanese possessive
pronouns are formed regularly taking the personal pronouns and suffixing
them with 'no': "of" like other nouns. On the other hand, you find also
languages that are very irregular, or languages that have very regular
nouns but very irregular verbs, or the other way round, etc...
So when you want to make a naturalistic conlang, you have a very broad
range from "fairly regular" to "bloody irregular" :) in which you can
pick what you prefer. I can give you an example with my own languages:
- Moten: regular morphological processes and regular sound changes that
make the whole thing a mess seeming very irregular.
- Azak: very very regular. But as it is a very agglutinating language
with a very strict morphology, it's not a surprise and still is very
naturalistic.
- Reman: a Romance language, where the irregularities can be easily put
into small categories. So it has little irregularities, but not that
much.
- Notya: completely regular, but it is the secret language of an
organisation and its very special grammar is already difficult enough :)
- Chasma"o"cho: comparable to English or French for its irregularities.
As you can see, the range is very broad.
--
Christophe Grandsire
Philips Research Laboratories -- Building WB 145
Prof. Holstlaan 4
5656 AA Eindhoven
The Netherlands
Phone: +31-40-27-45006
E-mail: grandsir@natlab.research.philips.com